Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals: Second Edition

“How can a switch to individual instruction be so powerful in its effects?... The lessons start with what the child can already do.”

―Marie Clay

This new edition of Marie Clay’s invaluable text contains the teaching procedures, implementation practices, and theoretical understandings that underpin Reading Recovery.

This second edition includes teaching procedures that have been progressively refined and revised over the past ten years in response to the experiences of Reading Recovery professionals, new research, and changes in education systems around the world.

Literacy Lessons describes an early literacy intervention that:

• builds on children’s strengths as the foundation for learning
• is directed toward a curriculum of in-the-head processes for working with written language
• utilizes reading and writing activities
• maximizes children’s contributions to their own learning. 

Marie Clay, FRSNZ, FNZPsS, FNZEI(Hon),Emeritus Professor, taught in primary schools and then at the University of Auckland where, for the next 30 years she introduced educational psychologists to ways of preventing psychological problems. She did post-graduate study in Developmental Psychology at the University of Minnesota on a Fulbright Scholarship and completed her doctorate at the University of Auckland with a thesis entitled "Emergent Literacy." Her 'Reading (and writing) Recovery' is an early literacy intervention, which is now implemented in five countries, and three languages. Literacy Lessons Designed For Individuals integrates what has been learned from that innovation with new research and theoretical advocacies.

Shifts in early literacy learning can be monitored by teachers using her Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement in English, Spanish and French. A series of individual lessons can be delivered in those languages to about 150,000 children worldwide annually using a guidebook called Reading Recovery: Guidelines for Teachers in Training. Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals is a similar guidebook which aims to make accelerated progress possible for a wider range of problems.

Marie Clay was past-President of the International Reading Association, served on the editorial committees of professional journals, was a research consultant at home and abroad including UNESCO, chaired a Social Science Research Committee advising government on policies and research allocations, and worked internationally with problem-solving related to early intervention research and practice.